Many phones "made for women" have substandard specs and options.

Women are accosted everywhere by pink: pink toys when they're young, pink clothes when they're teenagers, pink beer when they're adults. That wasn't the case in tech, which for decades created a black and chrome world, but as even advanced gadgets have gone mainstream in the last decade, pink has followed.

I'm not a professional pink hater, but at times I feel a low-level resentment of pinked-out technology; when companies churn out the Pink Version of some gadget, they aren't just filling out the rainbow in their product line. They're signaling the device is okay for women to use. Sometimes it can feel insulting.

But the more I investigated "lady gadgets," the more trouble I had condemning the color. The condemnation of pink things, particularly pink gadgets, often lacks a certain nuance. "This is pink, it's offensive!" "Why?" "It's discriminatory!" "Why?" "Because it's stereotyping!"

Product pinkification does bother people (see the reasons given below). But personally, I'm more concerned about a nefarious type of lady gadget that companies now push routinely: a gadget that isn't just "feminine" in color but is "feminine" in use. These are gadgets for women. If you suspect they are more patronizing than the pink versions of existing products could ever be, you would be correct.

Is pink the problem?

Pink products are often explicitly gendered color coding. People have been sliced, diced, and placed into bins by professional marketers for more than century now; pink is often used as a shorthand signal to women.

Targeting bright pink things specially at women can imply, "Dark, masculine things are scary! Here, this one is for you, you frightened and twitchy fawn." Women learn that pink products are suitable for their use; those that are not pink, or are not yet pink, might be too hardcore. (Shipping your pink phone with a with a makeup kit doesn't help this perception.)

Obviously, this isn't true in any objective sense. Women have managed to use cars, telephones, tractors, and lathes without pink versions. But the flood of pink continues unabated.

Are manufacturers infantilizing women in the process? "Pink is the colour of the trivial," wrote Katrina Onstad last year in Canada's The Globe and Mail. She objected to the "new pink ghetto" because "fairly or unfairly, pink—demure, unthreatening, feminine—is not really the color of a strong, wise adulthood."

But I find it hard to blame pink itself; most of the infantilization around pink seems to be a social construct. If lime green became the "color of women," we'd still have a problem: color, not functionality, is saying that some gadget is "right" for you. Indeed, plenty of men like pink too. Our own Peter Bright bursts into regular fits of apoplexy at ads for the magenta Lumia 800 which feature a female narrator and show the device being used by a woman for "today's little adventures." He'd love to have one, but finds the marketing so patronizing and sexist that it's as though Nokia is ordering him not to buy.

What's insulting is the more insidious category of products that are specially tailored in function and design to women—and that offer reduced functionality for the same (or a higher) price. Consider, for instance, the smartphone.

Worse products, same price

I spoke with Janet Wise, director of primary research at ABI Research, who noted that there are no specific differences in the way men and women use smartphones. "Differences in usage are really more a function of age," Wise said. She noted that while men are more likely to do things like check sports scores on their smartphones, normal smartphone activities like texting or browsing the Internet are conducted in equal rates by both genders.

Yet as more smartphones appear, they target women in increasingly demeaning ways. I'm certainly not the first to notice this: others who work in technology have commented on the gall of smartphone makers. Of one phone, Joanna Stern writing at This Is My Next last year, said, "We simply can't imagine a company creating a phone specifically for American women in this day and age."

"Does it come with yogurt?" Irin Carmon of Jezebel asked of the same woman-targeted phone.

To show how companies target, and help to perpetuate, the idea of a technologically illiterate lady, we've picked out a few smartphone examples from the recent past, and one coming in the near future.

The HTC Rhyme: it's not pink, but it's close enough.

HTC Rhyme

At launch, the Rhyme featured 2009 performance at a 2011 price. The injustice of paying $199 for a single-core processor and 768MB of RAM running Android is supposed to be mitigated by the inclusion of a boodle of accessories, such as a matching Bluetooth earpiece, charging dock, tangle-resistant ribbony headphones, and a dongle that will hang out of your purse and glow when your phone receives a message (companies have been giving these away for free for ages).

The marketing for the HTC Rhyme does it no favors: in one commercial, a young woman swans around, exercising, shopping, and being driven around in a car by a man. During her afternoon of leisure, she receives a call from "Work." The slightest trace of concern crosses her face before she hits "Decline."

HTC denies this phone is targeted at women, but the marketing and design suggest otherwise.The Rhyme has since dropped to $150 from Verizon, but there were a few months in there that the carrier was telling women, with a straight face, that they should plunk down $200 for a Barbie Dream Smartphone.

The BlackBerry Pearl. So pretty, you want to text on it (not too quickly, though).

BlackBerry Pearl

First, the name. What does a lady love more than jewelry? Pedicures, maybe, if we had to throw a guess out there, or free money. But a cute little cell phone with a jewelesque trackball (that eventually turns yellow with age and exposure) will also do.

If you somehow managed to discount the name and aren’t sure the Pearl was, and is, targeted at women, here's an advertisement for the BlackBerry Pearl 3G, released mid-2010, where a woman engages in such hardcore pursuits as shopping, exercising, and getting ready for a party. (With 256MB of RAM, a 624MHz processor, and a wacky shrunken keyboard the likes of which customers have not seen before or since, she didn’t set herself up to do much else.)

The 3G version of the Pearl arrived on AT&T 18 months ago, priced at $149.99 with a two-year contract. (The UK version of BlackBerry's Pearl 3G page includes, in its HTML source, the search-engine-friendly description, "Carry your friends wherever you go. Share news, gossip and more.") The Droid 2, which launched a couple of months earlier with a 1GHz processor and almost twice the Pearl 3G’s battery life, was $100 (with a $100 mail-in rebate). If you want a lesser phone with a lesser keyboard with a prettier name and color, you must pay up, ladies.

There is a good reason to sell overpriced pink phones to women: money.

Why not make a buck off the same women who buy $500 handbags?

If pink products didn't sell then they wouldn't exist. You take yourself too seriously if you are actually insulted by them. Maybe I should get upset when I see the same product cost 2x as much just because it has a sports team logo on it. How dare those bastards make money off my gender!

Apple, while not specifically targeting women, realize that they're a market and that's why the iPhone and iPad are offered in black and white. And from general overview, I see way more white iPhones than black ones, so they're obviously appealing (even though I personally find the black rectangle LCD, the black strip for the speaker, black hole for the camera, and black line for the proximity sensor ugly - to which the black version hides nicely away)

Then again, Nintendo has found out pink Nintendo DSes *WERE* the most popular color of the range. Much to my surprise, but confirmed by several sales people who also were shocked at how fast the pink ones moved (of course, they were all male).

The trick to getting a nice portrait with a camera phone...1) the camera phone should have a shiny spot near the lens. You should use this shiny spot to adjust aiming the phone. 2) stand or sit next to a window where it it daylight outside, but sunlight is not coming in the window. The window sill should be about eye height with most of the window above your eye height. If you have them, close sheer curtains, or a sheet, or a shower curtain over the window. 3) pull out something reflective (like your cell phone turned off) and turn your head so that the light illuminates a small triangular patch of skin on the cheek opposite the window. The shadow from the tip of your nose should go about half way across your cheek. (google image search for:rembrandt strobist) 4) Now take your self portrait however you wish. Ideally the camera will be 8-15 feet away, but get whatever length you can out of your arm, or snag a friend.

-MichaelBTW, a bright light source will defeat most of the problems of small sensors in camera phones.

There is a good reason to sell overpriced pink phones to women: money.

Why not make a buck off the same women who buy $500 handbags?

If pink products didn't sell then they wouldn't exist. You take yourself too seriously if you are actually insulted by them. Maybe I should get upset when I see the same product cost 2x as much just because it has a sports team logo on it. How dare those bastards make money off my gender!

I can tell you from experience selling phones in Dicksmith stores that ladies really didn't care about the color at all. Mostly, it just boiled down to what the store has available and how much it was.

I also do remember by the end of the month, we would have a massive stock of pink/purple/sparkly phones that accumulated in the back because guys wouldn't buy them and ladies just got the cheaper (and black) version of the phone.

Actually, I had more fuss from guys when we told them only color left is pink.

My first cell phone that I bought myself was a purple flippy phone. I then moved onto the original Droid. I loved the thing, Terminator-esque facade and all, because it functioned beautifully. Things targeted towards me were just inferior, and cost similarly. As the article mentioned, how dare they charge that price for the HTC Rhyme, when the specs were incredibly outdated by then? That's what my problem is, inferior products targeted at women because they don't "know better" at those prices. Currently sporting a Galaxy Nexus, and you know what, it's purple (yay!). It's what's on the inside that counts folks.

The Dior phone only makes you look stupid if the viewer knows how much it cost. Purely on the basis of looks, not bad.

I don't mind style variation and color options. But it makes more sense to me to make the same phones available in several colors, possibly even with swappable backs (easier for production of multiple colors), rather than having a specific model that is targeted specifically to women.

It's easy to target vapid people with loads of money and little regard for actual technology, regardless of gender. Hence, near-useless devices with nothing but appearances and a high price tag. Handbags just the start.

Meanwhile, marketing phones to men is easy... put enormous ballsspecs on it and give it a sci-fi name.

As it happens, of course, that nets a fair chunk of women too. But that's not where conventional marketing starts.

It's an interesting problem. I guess I have a question... assuming there's a market among women who want powerful, stylish phones -other- than the iPhone, what do you think it would be like?

"Pinkwashing" was one term I heard. And I don't think it's as big of a problem as many think. Most women I know, who are absolutely as un-techie as you can get, still ended up with either 1) cheap phones because they were broke students or 2) Good phones like the Galaxy, Nexus, iPhone, or what-have-you when they managed to scrounge enough money. I've honestly yet to see a woman buy a tech product on the sole basis of it being "designed" for a woman. The very idea of that, I'll agree with you, is stupid.

To Canadianize the example: It's like hockey jerseys. Originally, when marketers found out that women were *gasp* also fans of local sports teams, what did they do? Pink baby-tees! But guess what: Those products weren't selling as fast as they wanted to. Instead, women bought actual jerseys in male sizes, because who the fuck wants a training-wheel product related to a sports team that you loved? So, after a while, marketers smartened up and released jerseys in women's sizes and guess what? They sold like crazy.

I'm gonna have to agree with the others on this. I don't see them as sexist (as an item themselves - marketing is another matter). I see them as any other product. Fulfilling a need/want in order to make a buck. I know women who buy watches/bags etc that cost multiple of $1000's. But it's not due to their gender. It's because they have a high paying job and move in certain social circles and because it's usually better quality and genuily looks nicer/more original. Nothing more & nothing less. Reading anything more into it just being...think of the children!!!111!!1!

That being said - If you really wanna take this all the way then you may as well start talking about inane things like public toilet doors. Why is the symbol for a women still a stick figure with a skirt? Last I checked women were allowed to wear pants now.

EDIT: Of course, God help the poor fool who works for any of these companies and actually admits that particular products are aimed at particular sub-sets of people. What PR disaster that would be; Never mind the reasonable logic behind it.

I let my wife read the article as well - she agrees with me that it's silly. Women are perfectly capable of making up their own minds w/o other people "standing up" for them. Quite a lot of women (and men) resent people trying to remove gender from the world.

Not everything is a sexist conspiracy ladies, you just need to lighten up.

terrible sexist marketing of various products isn't a conspiracy, it's just the default state of affairs in America, much like the war on drugs, wars in the middle east, and other things that continue only because the people running them think it's a good idea no matter how much everyone else says it's dumb.

Not to deny pinkification, but anytime you have a special-edition anything it's overpriced. In general, things can't be reduced to underperform, so that's pretty unique. But still, while I don't see many (any, tbh) lady-versions of phones, there must be enough sales to make it profitable to make them.

For instance, in firearms there's been a recent trend to zombieize everything; biohazard logos, neon green bits, etc. Most people think it's pretty dumb, or at least are starting to think such (it's getting old), but there's also a minor segment of the market that likes zombie stuff.

tl;dr: most women don't want them, but there are enough that do to make it a profitable niche to sell to

I can tell you from experience selling phones in Dicksmith stores that ladies really didn't care about the color at all. Mostly, it just boiled down to what the store has available and how much it was.

I can see form over function. Heck I will often buy form over function. But it has to be a case where I do not need the extra function, and the form is genuinely better. These phones do not have the specs to be considered good enough. But the worst is all these phones are hideous. Don't try to sell me a design phone without putting the proper effort into the design.

Like seriously, if you want to appeal to people based on how the phone looks, please hire a competent designer and spend the time to produce a good design. They look like they went to the same reject that designed their other phones and told them to make a phone to appeal to people who like pretty things. Unable to actually design and unable to hide poor design behind good specs the designer picked some different colours, layered on some cheap plastic and called it a day. Even the Dior phone that at least has ok parts to the design is totally out of proportion, looking more like a design concept that they did not feel like iterating on and polishing into a good design. The iphone set the standard, yet nobody seems willing to follow.

Oh and I might have been to hard on the actual designers working at these companies. It could be that they are good, but the company does not value design and did not allocate the proper time resources to let them produce a good design. Design needs to be step one. Thinking you can hire a designer at the end to "pick some colours to make it pretty" is a recipe for a bad product.

Not everything is a sexist conspiracy ladies, you just need to lighten up.

Who said anything about conspiracy? It's just pervasive, uncoordinated sexism, and it's real. Casey isn't speculating about the existence of these phones or their marketing. She linked to the advertisements.

(You see, where I come from, the word "conspiracy" means people are working in concert to achieve some ends. In this case people are just generally biased, and that's the problem.)

I think Casey put it pretty well, but in short, women are being targeted with less phone for more money because they are women.

It's not news to me, but I'm happy to see Ars raising a stink about it. It's a waste of social resources. It's insulting. It's exploitative. We need to confront it and address it as rational adults, not just pretend it's just women being hysterical (choice of adjective not accidental).

deet wrote:

I think it might not be clear how to market for women *generally*.

There is no need to market either "for women" or "for men". The only products which need gender-specific marketing are underwear, hygiene products, sex toys (but only the ones which depend on certain shapes), contraceptives and anything else that only WORKS for ONE GENDER. If something COULD be used by the other gender there's no reason to market it differently to different genders. Doing so is insulting and perpetuates the stereotypes.

How about if they just market to people? "We have a phone which allows you to make phone calls and it's also a tiny computer with a keyboard and a camera. Huzzah!" Why does it have to have anything to do with gender?

Regarding the mirror key on the Jalou, a friend of mine used to have a phone with a mirror function. It seemed to have a real mirror behind the screen - it definitely wasn't a camera image. I don't know if the Jalou works the same way, but there's a precedent. Either way, it was pretty cool. (I don't remember who made it; this was in 2004 or 2005.)

There is no need to market either "for women" or "for men". The only products which need gender-specific marketing are underwear, hygiene products, sex toys (but only the ones which depend on certain shapes), contraceptives and anything else that only WORKS for ONE GENDER. If something COULD be used by the other gender there's no reason to market it differently to different genders. Doing so is insulting and perpetuates the stereotypes.

Oh I see, you're one of those people that wants to hold onto the erroneous 60's belief in blank slate.

Boys and girls show gender specific traits at a very young age and they have been observed in primate colonies as well.

This idea that males and females are only different by anatomy is wishful thinking. It would make for a nicer world but people evolved from animals and gender traits are a part of evolution. Sorry but that's the way it is.

I knew going into this that there would be comments that would make me sooper-grumpy, but here I am.

On an instinctual level, I like the color pink, but I'm aware that's probably almost ENTIRELY because I was socially conditioned to as a small child, and have made a conscious decision to favor my other favorite color, orange. My webpage is still pink, but there's a certain level of deliberate irony going on there, since I work in a nearly 100% male industry.

The problem isn't when something comes in black, blue, green, and pink. It's when it comes in black or pink, or just pink, because it implies a fundamental sexist assumption that women "need" their own version of things or they might not buy it. And if that's true, it's because we're conditioning girls to think that way, which is no good.

I read a very interesting book called "Delusions of Gender" and I highly recommend it. It raises an interesting point: imagine dressing your baby girl in a blue onesie with a picture of cars on it. Wait for 100% of people to assume she is male and look at you like you're crazy when you say she's a girl.y u no pink onesie?

For the record, my iPhone is black, and I was puzzled when the Verizon sales guy asked me FOUR times if I really wanted the black one, apparently I was supposed to be aware that women want white ones.

So we should complain that putting a dude in skull-and-crossbones painted power armour on the front of a video game cover is some how "boyification" of games? Or if that industry is too male orientated for you, how about the plethora of male orientated skin creams now available? Are they infantilizing men? No, of course not, and it would be moronic to suggest so.

This smacks of such straw-clutching desperation to play the victim card that you're starting to just make things up. It's really sad that Ars publishes rubbish articles like this, let alone makes them feature stories.

First greenwashing, now pinkification. There's a whole rainbow of woe out there.

It starts early; think about the phones (and zillions of other products, of course) aimed at preteen and teenage girls. Color choice is serious stuff for them, and some very serious money is involved. Certainly some of that carries forward into at least early adulthood, in some cases and in some markets? Now, it seems that very few, if any, pinkified phones are actually aimed at professional people. Think about the ad content and the psychology they use - they're for those who grew up pinkified and who actually expect such offerings, and who might even demand such offerings, should they suddenly vanish from the market. If the pitches seem somehow demeaning, well, "we" have been cultivating and engineering that mindset for generations and shouldn't be surprised by it.

I detested pink when I was younger. Now I like it a lot. But I understand where Casey is coming from and her examples are infuriating. Sadly, those blatant ads work on the much younger types

One of the worst offenders in regards to this sort of condescension was this tiny Sony portable computer that was absolutely stunning to look at (name escapes me and Google/Bing failing). I was tempted to buy it for my sister. But reviews commented on terribly poor performance that totally did not justify the high price and the kicker was the revelation that Sony was targeting well-heeled women with it; the "PC" in the name was supposedly to hint that it was small and sleek enough to be a "purse computer". Geh.

I had submitted a relatively lengthy post about how this is all just economics at work, but the comment system ate it... So here's a second stab at it:

Consider a basic game theory approach where the societal likes, dislikes, pressures, etc. are taken to be exogenous. The manufacturers can make four types of products with two attributes: quality (low [L] or high [H]) and targeting (none [N] or targeted [T]). From the manufacturers perspective, costs are in the order of LN < LT < HN < HT. Now, let's say that consumers impose a maximum price, P, that they are willing to pay for a device. Then, based off of market prices, it is reasonable to say that, revenue per device wise, LN < LT = HN = HT = P. Then, if we look at margins, LT > HN > HT, and LT > LN. However, as only the portion of the market that is targeted will consider purchasing LT, if the margin on HN > LN, then the optimal case is to produce LT, HN, and LN. This is more or less what we see in the market.

Of course, this is a fairly hasty game-theoretic look at this, ignoring fixed costs, switching costs for production, etc., but the point is that if we step back and detach emotions from the situation, we might rather expect this outcome, as companies exist to maximize shareholder wealth (at least in the classical models). Granted, one could make an argument about positive intangible benefits to reputation from producing high quality targeted devices, but such an argument is rather messy to draw up in any rigor, so I'll leave that to someone else if they'd care to follow it through.

The problem isn't when something comes in black, blue, green, and pink. It's when it comes in black or pink, or just pink, because it implies a fundamental sexist assumption that women "need" their own version of things or they might not buy it. And if that's true, it's because we're conditioning girls to think that way, which is no good.

Is there a sexist assumption if NFL branded phones are sold to men?

Did you know that there are women who buy 15k dollar handbags? Why not milk that crowd? Because it is sexist? Is it sexist to sell 15k sports memorabilia to men? If you don't like pink phones then don't buy them. I don't see any reason to charge sexism here, a lot of the overpriced pink fashion crap is actually designed by women. Are those women sexist? This is so rediculous.

I think the underlying problem people have is gender itself. Politically correct society wants to believe that all stereotypes are entirely fictional when we know this isn't true. Even if you got rid of TV little girls would still play with dollies and boys would kill ants. They've been doing that for thousands of years, well before TV and marketers ever existed. But it's more comforting to believe that humans are blank slates even though this doesn't make any sense from the perspective of evolution.

I can tell you from experience selling phones in Dicksmith stores that ladies really didn't care about the color at all. Mostly, it just boiled down to what the store has available and how much it was.